Peter B. Lewis donates $5 million to the Cleveland Institute of Art, his biggest hometown donation in a decade

View full sizeMarvin Fong, The Plain DealerPeter B. Lewis in Beachwood on Tuesday.

Peter B. Lewis, the iconoclastic insurance executive and philanthropist, has done an about-face on his hometown by making a $5 million donation to the Cleveland Institute of Art.

The gift, announced Tuesday, is the biggest from Lewis to any institution in Cleveland since he declared a temporary boycott on his local giving in 2002 to vent frustration with the city.

He ended the boycott in 2003, but has made local gifts only up to $1 million since then.

Lewis made the $5 million donation, he said Tuesday over lunch at Moxie in Beachwood, to recognize that the $150-million-plus Uptown development in University Circle, of which the art institute is part, has met the high hopes he articulated for the development in 2004.

“It’s the first time in a long time I’ve been impressed by Cleveland,” he said. “I’m impressed by the achievement and accomplishment, I’m impressed all around.”

View full sizeCourtesy of StantecA view of the future expansion of the Cleveland Institute of Art complex at Uptown in University Circle from the south, includes the future Peter B. Lewis Theater, at right.

Lewis, 78, the chairman and former president and CEO of Progressive Corp., has a fortune valued at $1.2 billion by Forbes magazine. He divides his time between homes in Coconut Grove., Fla.; Aspen, Col.; New York; and Cleveland.

Over the past 20 years, he has donated roughly $500 million to causes including Princeton University, his alma mater; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the reform of marijuana laws; Cleveland charities and liberal-leaning organizations, which he calls “progressive with a small p.”

His $5 million gift to the art institute puts it in a position to complete by late 2014 a $66 million renovation and expansion of its Joseph McCullough Center for the Visual Arts on Euclid Avenue at East 115th Street, Nunes said.

The first phase of Uptown, which will be completed in the fall, includes more than 100 rental apartments, plus bars, restaurants, a Constantino’s supermarket, the new Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland and the expanded art institute.

View full sizePeggy Turbett, The Plain DealerWorkers fasten insulation panels at Uptown in this 2011 photograph.

The eight-acre project has replaced The Triangle, a moribund collection of chain businesses, fast food restaurants and parking lots built in the 1980s at the Euclid-Mayfield corner. The project is also filling the parking lot north of Euclid Avenue and South of Hessler Road at Ford Drive, once known jokingly as “Hessler Beach.”

Uptown grew out of a collaboration among Case Western Reserve University, University Circle Inc., cultural institutions, a private developer and lenders.

Lewis helped spark the thinking that led to Uptown in 2004 by challenging Edward Hundert, then president of CWRU, to replace the Triangle.

The dialogue over the evolving project was part of a long-term effort by various leaders in Cleveland to woo Lewis back to engagement in Cleveland after a spectacular falling out in 2002.

Lewis — long viewed as a go-to source of individual philanthropy — shocked the city that year by announcing he would boycott all Cleveland charities to protest what he then called mismanagement at Case Western Reserve University.

Lewis was angry at the time over the way CWRU had developed its new building for the Weatherhead School of Management, which was named for him and designed by his friend, the internationally renowned Los Angeles architect, Frank Gehry.

Lewis donated $36.9 million to the project, but the cost mushroomed to $61.7 million at a time when the university experienced high turnover in top administrative posts, including its presidents.

View full sizeChuck Crow, The Plain DealerA February, 2011 picture shows the area formerly occupied by The Triangle development as cleared for Uptown.

Lewis in 2002 called CWRU “a diseased university that is collapsing and sucking Cleveland into a hole with it.”

He also said that Cleveland was declining because too many lawyers were involved in civic leadership.

“Lawyers are functionaries hired by the people who do something,” he said “but we’ve got a situation where they’re running the town. It’s absurd.”

A decade later, Lewis had nothing but praise for CWRU’s president, Barbara Snyder.

“She has impressed me from the day she arrived,” he said.

Lewis also praised a new generation of leaders in town. He singled out developer Ari Maron, 34, a partner in MRN Ltd., the firm that’s building the apartments, retail and restaurant buildings at Uptown. Maron was part of a small group of Uptown project leaders who made a presentation to Lewis about the development last month.

After hearing the presentation, which took place in a new apartment at Uptown, Lewis said, “I said to myself, ‘they did what I asked. I’m supporting the effort.’ ”

Lewis’s gift will help the Cleveland Institute of Art, a private, four-year art college, break ground later this year for its new Gund Building, an expansion of the McCullough Center studio complex, Nunes said. The art institute’s board is set to vote in August on scheduling the groundbreaking, Nunes said.

Once the expansion is completed, the art institute could sell its other building a half mile away at 11141 East Blvd., opposite the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Nunes said, “we are currently in discussions with interested parties about the disposition of the [East Boulevard] Gund site.”

In honor of the gift from Lewis, the art institute will name the new movie theater in its Uptown complex for him, Nune said.

Lewis said that while entreaties from Nunes played a role in his decision to help the art institute, it was significant that his philanthropic advisor, Jennifer Frutchy of Boston, kept him focused on Uptown’s evolution over the years.

Lewis’s self-imposed boycott against Cleveland charities lasted only a year. But until now, his largest local gift was a $1 million donation to the Idea Center at PlayhouseSquare in 2004. “Cleveland is definitely off the bottom from my uninformed point of view,” Lewis said. “The group that I suggested deliver, delivered. Whoever’s in the whole shooting match, god bless ‘em.”

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